Lully and the ironic convention

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Howard

Three hundred years after his death in 1687 Jean-Baptiste Lully's reputation is entering a new phase. Only a minority of opera-goers today have had the opportunity of seeing one of Lully's operas performed in the theatre. French music, always a degree less accessible to a non-French public than the music of its Italian and Austro-German neighbours, remains the last corner of the seventeenth-century repertory to make a popular appeal to twentieth-century audiences. There are indications, however, in the appearance of a new collected edition, in the small output of new recordings, and in the greater volume of scholarly investigation associated with the tercentenary, that the distinctive sound of Lully's music will soon become at least as familiar as that of his contemporaries Purcell and Cavalli. And familiarity will surely engender popularity: the music needs no special pleading.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.


Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.


Funny Girls ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Michelle Ann Abate

The Introduction provides necessary historical background information. It gives an overview of the book's overall aims and argument, and it also summarizes the project's methodology and organizational plan.When critics, scholars, and fans think about major developments in American comics from the first half of the twentieth century, they commonly think of events like the advent of the Sunday newspaper supplement, the rise of the comic book, and the backlash against the industry by individuals like Fredric Wertham. The Introduction to this project makes a case for adding another phenomenon to this history: the popularity of young female protagonists.As it explains, examining figures like Little Lulu, Nancy, and Little Orphan Annie-both individually and as part of a larger tradition-yields compelling new insights about the industry during the first half of the twentieth century. Remembering and recouping the cadre of Funny Girls who played such a significant role in the popular appeal and commercial success of American comics during the first half of the twentieth century challenges longstanding perceptions about the gender dynamics operating during this era.


Author(s):  
John M. Chenoweth

This introductory chapter sketches the questions and goals of the overall project and the needed background information about Quakerism. It introduces the Tortola Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (“Quakers”) which formed in the British Virgin Islands about 1740 and addresses how archaeology can approach the study of religion and religious communities. This chapter also serves as an introduction to Quakerism itself, including its ideology based on individual, un-mediated communion with God, and a brief history of the group from its foundation in the political and economic turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England, to the “Quietism” of wealthy “Quaker Grandees” in Philadelphia, to a nineteenth and twentieth century history of schism and reunion around pacifism. The Quaker structure of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings is introduced, and connected to both community oversight and support structures. Finally, this chapter introduces three main Quaker ideals—simplicity, equality, and peace—which will be interrogated throughout the work as they change in their interactions with Caribbean slavery and geography.


2018 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ian Atherton

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Hill ◽  
Henrik Lagerlund ◽  
Stathis Psillos

Causal powers have been posited to ground and explain activity in nature. And yet, powers are subject to scrutiny and criticism today as they were in the seventeenth century and for more or less the same reasons. The detailed and substantive Introduction sketches the key conceptions of, and arguments for and against, powers from Aristotle up to the present. In the first part (Sections 1.1–1.5), there is an account of the history of the powers debate, starting with the Aristotelian conception and moving through medieval accounts to the revolt against powers by the novatores of the seventeenth century. Various criticisms of powers, notably by Descartes, the occasionalists, Boyle and Newton, as well as endorsements, notably by Leibniz, are presented. Then there is an account of Hume’s systematic critique of the epistemology and ontology of powers, of the transition from a power-based to a law-based conception of nature (notably in the work of Mill) and finally a recounting of the various attempts to eliminate or reduce powers and dispositions in the twentieth century. Sections 1.6–1.9 describe the key reasons for the comeback of powers in the last quarter of the twentieth century, notably the issues concerning the nature of properties and the ontic status and necessity of the laws of nature. Sections 2.1–2.12 offer a detailed summary of the twelve contributions to the volume. Finally, the chapter concludes with questions for moving forward.


Author(s):  
John P. Doyle

The seventeenth-century Portuguese Dominican, John of St Thomas or John Poinsot, was a major figure in late scholastic philosophy and theology. Educated at Coimbra and Louvain, he taught both disciplines in Spain: at Madrid, Plasencia and Alcalá. Aspiring to be a faithful disciple of Thomas Aquinas, he published a three-volume Cursus philosophicus thomisticus (Thomistic Philosophical Course) and before he died began the publication of a Cursus theologicus (Theological Course). His philosophical writing was explicitly on logic and natural philosophy. However, in both his philosophical and theological works, he treated many metaphysical, epistemological and ethical issues. His logic is divided into two parts, formal and material. Of particular interest is his semiotic doctrine which appears in the second part. In natural philosophy, he explained Aristotle with a Thomistic slant. While following Aquinas in theology, John at times developed his master’s doctrine along new lines. Both in his own time and after he has had considerable authority within scholasticism, especially for Thomists. Among those whom he has influenced in twentieth-century Thomism are Joseph Gredt, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Santiago Ramirez, Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon.


Author(s):  
Nancy Reynolds

Apollon Musagète, premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928, and most widely known since the 1950s as Apollo, is the oldest work by choreographer George Balanchine still in active repertoire. For its age alone the ballet is significant, but it also marked a new phase in the development of Balanchine’s artistic philosophy. In 1945 he wrote, "Apollo I look back on as a turning point. In its discipline and restraint … the score was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I too could eliminate. I began to see how I could clarify … by reducing what seemed to be multiple possibilities to the one which is inevitable" (Balanchine qtd in Lederman 1975: 81). Such was Balanchine’s influence that what was a turning point for him was also a turning point for ballet in the twentieth century. The score that so influenced Balanchine was composed, by Igor Stravinsky, for a small string orchestra. Diaghilev described it as "an amazing work, extraordinarily calm, and with greater clarity than anything he has so far done, [with] filigree counterpoint [a]round transparent, clear-cut themes, all in the major key; [it is] somehow music not of this world, but from somewhere above" (Diaghilev qtd in White 1979: 342).


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